“Ydy dy dad di yn dy dŷ du di?”A short guide to Welsh pronunciation

About the Welsh people

As you’ll know if you’ve read The Deepest Grave (US link here, UK link here), the Welsh people are Celts – the race that once populated all the isles of Britain and Ireland.

When the Romans ruled in Britain, from 43 AD to 410 AD, the people under their jurisdiction were Celts, and those people spoke a mixture of languages that all shared a family resemblance to modern Welsh. (Gaelic, Cornish and Breton are all in the same fine family.)

Then the Romans left. The old order started to collapse. One Celtic king had the bright idea of bringing some German/Danish mercenaries over to help with incursions from some annoying tribes. And . . . whoops! Those mercenaries (Angles, Jutes and Saxons) took a look at their new home and decided they’d rather like to have it.

What happened next isn’t totally clear. Did the Angles/Jutes/Saxons simply slaughter and displace the Celts? or was the process more one of peaceful intermarriage, trade and assimilation? We don’t know.

In the British Dark Ages, not very much was written down and, what was written down, hasn’t mostly survived the fourteen or fifteen centuries to the present day. Did Arthur fight the invading Saxons and win a glorious victory at Mount Badon? We don’t know. I’d bet probably yes, but I wouldn’t bet very much.

A dolmen: They didn’t have these in Jutland.

About the Welsh language

What we do know is that by the time the dust settled – by, let’s say, the ninth century AD – Celtic speakers had been pushed into the far west and north of the country (Cornwall, Wales and Scotland, to be a little anachronistic about it). That left the Anglo-Saxons in charge of modern-day England . . . and indeed, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes started calling themselves Anglii, or English, to celebrate. (The Scots and Welsh, to this day, call them Saxons – Sais or Sassenach.)

The really weird thing about all this?

It’s that English has almost no traces of Celtic in it. All those centuries of slaughter / marriage / displacement and whatever else, made almost no mark on the English tongue. So there’s a small handful of Celtic words – like dolmen or loch – that still exist in English, but only really because they refer to geographical features that the Angles and Saxons didn’t have back home. Mostly though, English just bears no trace of the languages it shoved aside.

That’s weird, but it also helps explain why you have difficulty in pronouncing Welsh (assuming you aren’t Welsh, I mean.)

The simple fact is that your many-times-great English grandpas and grandmas didn’t bother with the exercise themselves. Their laziness is your impediment. If even a few hundred Celtic words continued to exist in English, you’d have a head start – but they don’t. Sorry!

One of my favourite Welsh hills, Mynydd Troed, with that lovely soft “dd” at the end of Mynydd.

How to pronounce Welsh consonants (the very, very short guide)

OK. So we start with some good news. Most consonants in Welsh sound exactly like their English counterparts.

B is a B.

C is a (hard) C, as in cat.

D – if there’s just one of them – is just a straightforward D.

As a matter of fact, in many ways, and because it’s much more consistent, Welsh is a rather easier language to pronounce than English. So unlike in English:

C is always hard, never soft (like carpet, not ice).

S is always soft as in soft, never hard as in taser.

G is always hard as in goose, never soft as in gentle.

Easy right?

Only then it starts getting a little more tricksy.

The Welsh F denotes the English V of violet. So, in fact, English violet comes into Welsh as fioled.

Meanwhile, the Welsh FF denotes the English F sound. And that’s easy enough with a word like Cardiff, but looks a little odd with place names like Ffynnon Gynydd, a placename (meaning ‘holy well’) not far from where I grew up and where my mother still lives.

Another real curiosity to anglophone eyes is the Welsh DD, which equates to the English TH. Only – did you know? – English actually has two TH sounds, not one. There’s the soft TH of think, a sound which Welsh handles with a simple TH. But then there’s the hard TH of them or there, and that becomes a DD in Welsh. So that Ffynnon Gynydd placename starts with a soft F sound and ends with a a soft TH one. Beautiful, no?

And then there are some consonants in Welsh which don’t really have any proper English equivalents.

The LL sound is kind of an HL one. So put the tip of your tongue on the roof of your mouth as though you were going to say “L” . . . but then try saying “H” instead. And then, as you say “H”, let that sound segue swiftly into an L. Do that, and you’re golden.Oh, and ‘Llan’ is a very common prefix in placenames meaning ‘saint’. So a village near where my mother lives is ‘Llanstephan’, meaning ‘(the settlement around the church of) St Stephen’. Those Llans give you plenty to get practising on: Llanstephan, Llandefalle, Llanelli, Llandewi and so on.

On the letter R, you just need to make sure you always pronounce it, and always give it a bit of a roll. So English speakers (not Scots ones) are happy to leave the Rs in the darn barn more or less silent. You want to pronounce that R and give it some good Celtic wellie to get it moving nicely. (you can practice on bardd – meaning poet – to get you practised.)

Mostly though, your eye is more likely to be caught by the Welsh RH, as in Rhayader – a place that Fiona fans know as being a very bad place from which to be abducted. (See This Thing of Darkness; US link here, UK one here.) The Welsh RH is an aspirated R, so you need to roll that R, but aspirate it at the same time, as though you’re saying an H over the top of the R. Good luck with that, chum.

Aberystywth – where North Welsh dialect meets South Welsh.

How to pronounce Welsh vowels

You know what? You really don’t want to know this.

It’s not even that the vowels themselves are so hard, it’s more that there’s a whole host of rules about when a particular vowel is long or short . . . and then some of the vowels (y, w) are tricksy, and then there are the dipthongs, and then again things can change according to where in the word you encounter them. Oh, and the North Welsh don’t do things quite like the South Welsh, and both halves of Wales definitely think they’re right. (The North Welsh are lovely, but they’re wrong. Sorry!)

So.

For a supremely short and somewhat erratic guide, you can proceed as follows:

Short vowels:

a – Like a in tap

e – Like e in let

i – Like i in pit

o – Like o in pot

u – Same is i; it’s like the i in pit.

w – As in book.

y – Like uh in above (this is the “schwa”, which is actually very common in English – think the e in label.)

Long vowels:

a – Like a in father.

e – Like ae in aeroplane, but don’t let any “R” sound in there

i – Like the i in . . . well, this is the Fiona Griffiths website, right, so it’s got to be the i in police

o – Like aw in awkward.

w – Like oo in pool.

u and y – same as i.

Snowdon. With snow.

Some Welsh tongue twisters

You’ve got everything so far, right? You’re feeling confident?

Good. In that case, you’re ready to crack a tooth on one of these. They’re taken from Omniglot and where you see a link, you can click on it to get an audio version of the bit of text in question.

Magwyd Magi Madog mewn ffedog ond methwyd magu mab Magi Madog yn yr un ffedog ag y magwyd Magi Madog.Magi Madog was brought up in an apron, but Magi Madog’s son could not be brought up in the same apron in which Magi Madog was brought up.

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Her first night on patrol

What was it like for her – a young uniformed officer witnessing the troubled, late-night streets of Cardiff for the first time in her career?

Did she relish the experience? What did others make of her? And what happened when – for the first time in her police career – she saw violence, dealt with bloodshed?

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An interview with Fiona Griffiths

The following transcript records a short interview between Harry Bingham, an author, and Fiona Griffiths, a young detective with the South Wales Police.

Fiona Griffiths is – allegedly – fictional and exists (again, according to the allegations) only in the pages of Harry’s books. Today they meet face to face for only the second time, this time in a central London coffee shop. Harry’s literary agent is sitting quietly in the corner keeping an eye on proceedings.

FG: Fine. So let’s go with that. Let’s just say you’re my no-inverted-commas author. In which case, I’d presume you know that I don’t like coffee. That I don’t drink any kind of caffeine. And that my hot beverage of choice is peppermint tea. So why ask?

HB: (Snappishly) Just there’s a thing called politeness, and . . .

Agent flashes HB a warning look and HB trails off. The agent goes to get the drinks. HB tries small talk, but FG makes it very hard going. The agent brings the drinks and goes back to his corner.

HB: You know why we’re here.

FG: You’ve got a book out.

HB: Yes.

FG: One that exploits my personal story for your commercial gain.

HB: OK. Don’t want to bang on about this. But I am your author.

FG: So – what? That means I have no will of my own, does it? In which case, I have to say it sounds like a pretty terrible book.

HB: It’s not a terrible book. Look, you’re a remarkable woman. In the course of your investigation, you experienced – and you achieved – some remarkable things.

FG: I’m a detective, yes? I did my job. I was called to a crime scene. I found the body of a young woman –

HB: In a country churchyard. At midnight. And the corpse was wearing a thin white dress on a wild October night.

FG: That is an accurate, if limp, summary of the facts, as they intially presented.

HB: You investigated further –

FG: Because it’s my job –

HB: And you discovered that the woman died as a result of natural causes. Fibrotic lungs and some kind of heart attack.

FG: Yes, and then I followed a clue – a barley seed – that led me to the Monastery of St. David at Llanglydwen. I also discovered that a girl, a teenager, had disappeared from the same valley some eight years before. Although she was presumed dead, no body was ever found.

HB: Which is a good dramatic set up, right? You find a corpse without a crime and, eight years earlier, in the same place, there was a crime without a corpse?

HB: Look, I think the set-up is pretty good, if you really want to know. But I’m just trying to do my job. I’ve got a book out. And it’s not enough writing the damn thing, I’ve got publishers who want me to help market it. They want you to help market it.

FG: Me?

HB: Yes.

FG I’m a detective, remember? A detective, not some kind of marketing person. What do you want me to do? Wear a short skirt and a satin sash and stand in the centre of Cardiff, handing out samplers and shouting, ‘please buy that man’s book’?

HB: Well, you know what? That might actually help a bit. And I’m not that man. I’m your author.

FG: My author, right. So you claim that this is your book? Your story.

HB: I don’t just claim it, Fiona. It’s my damn name on the cover.

FG: And mine.

HB: Right, and yours, but –

FG: But you want to tell me that you’re my author. And that it’s your book. And your story.

HB: Yes.

FG: In which case – you sent me there.

HB: What? To the monastery?

FG: There, yes. But I meant up that hill. To that little pool which never emptied, no matter how much you drained it. And it was you who sent me into that tunnel. That cave.

HB: (Gently) Look, I know. I know that was hard.

FG: And I did it. I entered that cave, because it was my job and my duty to do so.

HB: (Still gently) Your job and your duty, yes. But perhaps it was also your compulsion. Your obsession. Because I’ve never known you let an investigation drop.

FG: Yes. My obsession too, I know that. But it was frightening in there. Very frightening. And when the collapse happened, I didn’t know if . . .

HB: I know.

FG: And that wasn’t even the worst. The worst was in Llanglydwen later. When the walls started rising around me and I saw that ring of faces and I thought . . .

HB: I know.

FG: And I do all that for you. I go to those places and I do what I have to do and I solve the case and I nail the bad guys. But oh no. That’s never enough, is it? You want me to sell your damn books. Books that I never even wanted you to write.

HB: You do know I would never abandon you? I take you to some scary places, I know that, but I have always got you out. I will always look after you.

FG: I have shotgun pellets in my leg. Little embedded pellets that I’ll have in me for ever. That’s what looking after me involves, does it? That’s your version of nice?

Agent: It’s called The Dead House. It’s available in all good bookshops and, I hope, plenty of bad ones too.

FG: Right. So: please buy this man’s book. It’s called The Dead House. It’s got corpses and it’s got me and it’s got some of the scariest things I’ve ever been involved with. And if you’re worried that this whole thing might actually be a really crappy way to treat somebody, you don’t have to worry because I’m just a fictional fucking character and nobody actually has to give a damn.

This Thing of Darkness – cover reveal

“She is similar to Lisbeth Salander, an intelligent but profoundly damaged young woman, but Fiona is less hostile and more curious, sort of a good guy sociopath.” — Audrey, Amazon.com [The best reviews illuminate something for the writer, and this one did. “less hostile and more curious … a good guy sociopath” – that’s acute, that is.]

“DON’T read The Strange Death if you have a weak heart, unless you are bent on suicide by thriller.” Peter J Earle, Amazon.com [OK, that’s not particularly illuminating, but it IS funny. I wish I’d written that . . . only not about my own book, obviously.]

“Fiona, who has only cried once in her adult life, is portrayed with great psychological depth without being dark. Even though Fiona battles with her identity and borderline psychosis, I never found her depressing. She is a strong woman. A survivor … What I found particularly clever is the way that, at times, she shifts in and out of referring to herself in the third person, showing confusion rather than describing the fog. In fact, as much as this is a story of the search for a criminal mastermind, it’s a story of Fiona’s search for her identity.” — Loretta Milan, from Literarylightbox.com [I love that, about the book being a search for F’s identity, because that’s totally true. If you read that about a book, of course, you’d think it was deadly dull, but with Fiona around – I hope – things are unlikely to stay dull for long!]

A couple of things

And in amongst the nice comments – just two things I wanted to pick up on:

A fair few of you have been upset by The Thing that happens at the end of the book. You know. With Fiona andthat guy. The one you wanted her to . . . But rest assured, I don’t want Fiona to be unhappy and alone for the rest of her fictional life. It’s just that (sorry!) I have to treat you like four-year-olds with sugar cravings. You want all the good things now and yes, yes, you can have them EVENTUALLY. But you won’t enjoy it as much if you aren’t made to wait. And, no, I’m not going to tell you how that particular storyline pans out.

You want me to write faster. Hey – I’m trying, I’m trying. Truth is, it does take at least a year to write something half-decent (and I do aim for more than half). But because there was a long pause between LOVE STORY and STRANGE DEATH, I’m making up by bringing out Fiona Griffiths #4, THIS THING OF DARKNESS, this summer – July in fact. If you’re on my mailing list (join here), I’ll let you know when the book’s out. After that, I’ll be bringing one out a year until Fiona or I run out of puff.

The British cover

The US cover is shown at the very top of this post. The British cover – same theme, not surprisingly! – is shown left.

What can I tell you about the book without giving the game away? Well, hey ho, Fiona gets assigned to the most boring job in all of policing. (She complains of becoming a “librarian of crime”.) But she pleads with her boss that she should be allowed to pursue a couple of very old, very cold, very unpromising cases on the side. Her boss is foolish enough to say yes . . . and needless to say things don’t stay boring for long.

In the shenanigans that follow, there is some water involved and some rock and a very modern twist on a classic old-style crime. Also, if any of you are thinking of setting foot on a large moving object any time when Fiona is close by . . . well, just don’t do it. It really, really isn’t safe.

Also: I’ve played a little game with some of the character names in my book. Probably 99% of readers won’t even notice, but there’ll be a tiny minority of people who do notice and have some fun figuring out exactly what I’ve been up to. I’ve also included a little set of quiz questions in the back of the book. First person to email me with a full set of correct answers can get a little package of signed books from me. Release date is 2nd July. The book will be available for pre-order very soon. Thanks for sticking with me! Oh, and do sign up to the mailing list if you haven’t already.

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Strange Death in America

Step 1: sell the Fiona Griffiths series to the biggest publisher in the US.

Step 2: get great reviews.

Step 3: let the biggest publisher in the US do the rest.

And the plan was kind of going OK. Step one – yep, check: Penguin Random House bought the first two books in the series. They published them beautifully, both as e-books and in print.

Step two – yep, we were good there too: the reviews, from critics and readers alike, have been great.

Unfortunately, though, for reasons I still don’t really understand, PRH didn’t want to continue and my nice little plan crashed and burned. Mostly I think they couldn’t figure out how to make $27 hardbacks work in a market which is flooded by $4.99 ebooks . . . and they weren’t happy to take the obvious step of ditching the product that people didn’t want and maximising sales of the one they did.

Anyway. Things didn’t work out. PRH were great while I worked with them, but they didn’t want to continue with our existing relationship and I sure as heck didn’t want my lovely American readers to go without their fix of small, somewhat crazy Welsh detectives.

So I’m going solo. The third book in the series is The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths and it’s coming out on January 29, 2015. If you want to pre-order it from Amazon, you can do so here. It’ll be out on iTunes and B&N and everywhere else at the same time. If you prefer to read in print (which I do) then I’m making a $15 print edition available too, (only via Amazon, I’m sorry to say — getting wider distribution proved too complicated for various reasons.)

The book already has some great reader reviews – mostly from US readers who loved the series so much, they had the third book shipped out from the UK. Needless to say, I adore feedback from all my readers – positive, yes, but the negative stuff too – and I’m really thrilled this book seems to be hitting the right buttons.

Oh yes, and a word about the cover image for this new edition. The cover comes from a really talented Romanian designer, who wanted to say “Dead” and “Strange” and “Wales” all in one simple image. So: a tree seen from a “corpse eye view” through a pane of rainy glass. It’s a love-it-or-loathe-it cover, but I personally love it. I hope you do too.

I can’t wait for you to read that book – and don’t forget to let me know what you think of it!

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]]>Talking to the deadhttps://harrybingham.com/talking-to-the-dead-review/
Sat, 05 May 2012 10:41:13 +0000http://harrybingham.com.servepreview.net/?p=192

Talking to the dead

Some books are about plot, others about place or mood, others about beautiful writing. Talking to the Dead has its share of all those things (I hope), but the book has only one star and that’s its heroine, Fiona Griffiths.

The book had an odd pre-history for me. I wrote the first draft of the book at tremendous speed. Not quite two months, perhaps, but certainly less than three. But the book had been in preparation for maybe two years: the central (first-person) character gathering slowly like mist thickening on a November road.

The initial elements of character were pretty easy to come up with. I’d have my character be young, be female, be Welsh, be hellishly smart (Cambridge degree, philosophy). Because I didn’t want her to be like every other detective, I’d have her non-smoking, teetotal and with close and important family relationships.

But that’s a ticklist, not a character. It’s a list of characteristics that feels rather like one of those Photofit images: a practical way to disassemble a human being into a list of features, but not really alive. The difference between a Photofit and a Rembrandt portrait – well, it’s everything, isn’t it?

Intense, difficult, dangerous, unpredictable

I knew other things too. I knew I wanted her intense. Difficult. Dangerous. Unpredictable. I wanted her odd. But that’s so easy to say, and I didn’t want those things to feel stuck on from the outside. If, for example, you’re currently watching Homeland – I am and I think it’s great – you’ll know that the Claire Danes character theoretically has a mood disorder. So she takes some pills now and again. Sometimes she shouts too much. Sometimes she works hard. But the whole nutcase strand seems a bit of an afterthought. Indeed, I’m not even sure that they’re remembering to keep the pills thread alive. The mood disorder, in the end, isn’t that central to the character.

So I knew what I wanted in principle, but didn’t have the essential element from which all those things would naturally emerge. I probably mused on that problem for a year or so, slowly getting closer to an understanding of my character, but still missing the key.

And then – well, I got the key. I can’t tell you what it is, because Talking to the Dead revolves as much around the mystery of the character (Fiona Griffiths) as it does around the crime she’s investigating. But oh my gosh, what a key! The thing at the heart of Fiona’s make-up is perfectly based in fact. Real people have this thing – indeed, my wife once treated one of them. And it’s not just a startling condition to have. It’s so perfectly shaped for a crime novel – with its mysteries, its preoccupation with life and death, its darkness – that I felt bewildered that no one else had used the device before me.

The Fiona that emerged from all this is the most dramatic character I’ve ever written. Dramatic not just because of the situations she finds herself in, but because of who she is. She’ll act in ways that are utterly unpredictable to the reader (or, often, the writer), but ones which emerge from her very essence. Her language too is different from my own. In terms of prose, Talking to the Dead is quite different from anything else I’ve written. Tougher, sharper, odder, more modern.

After a bit of fooling around on the shoreline, I took the plunge, began to write the novel – and it flowed out of me with an intensity and drama I’ve never previously experienced. The character herself no longer felt like something designed by me. She felt – or feels – like a real human being, but a human of exceptional intensity and force. Perhaps it’s partly that I’m writing her in the first person, but she doesn’t really seem outside me. I can witness scenes through my eyes or through hers. (And hers usually offer the more interesting view.)

And Fiona’s also given me the one thing I’m sure of with Talking to the Dead. People may or may not like the book. They may or may not warm to the voice. They may be caught up in the nested mysteries, or they may not. But no one, I think, will read the book and be unpersuaded by the voice. Which makes sense. In the end, I didn’t create Fiona, she just adopted me – and she’s welcome to stay as long as she likes. You can read more about her here.

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]]>How I came to write this bookhttps://harrybingham.com/how-i-came-to-write-this-book/
Sat, 28 Apr 2012 12:24:49 +0000http://harrybingham.com.servepreview.net/?p=196

How I came to write this book

My path into TALKING TO THE DEAD was a curious one. I was approached by a well-known figure who was contemplating working with a ghostwriter on a crime thriller. I hadn’t read any crime for a long time, but was intrigued by the project. So I went out and bought about two dozen crime novels, then read them back-to-back over about two weeks.

From America, I read:

Robert Crais

Harlan Coben

Linwood Barclay

Michael Connelly

George Pelecanos

Carl Hiaasen

Sarah Paretsky

Patricia Cornwell

Kathy Reichs

Elmore Leonard

I don’t remember all the authors I read then, but the list certainly included:

Val McDermid

Linda LaPlante

Colin Dexter

Minette Walters

Nicci French

Mark Billingham

Ian Rankin

RJ Ellory

Barbara Vine

I also read a bit of crime fiction in translation, though not at that stage Stieg Larsson.

Having done my reading, I started to think through what I’d read. Everything involved a crime and some kind of investigation, but that still left a million possible variations. Was the protagonist a cop or not? Was the tale first person or third? One viewpoint or many? Was romance a significant element? What about humour? How about forensic science? Morality? Was the book elegantly written or potboilerish? Was it more thriller or more crossword-puzzle style mystery? How violent?

Because I’m built that way, I created a spreadsheet and analysed my results. The spreadsheet didn’t spit out a Formula For Writing Bestsellers – and I didn’t want it to. But the exercise did help me understand what I wanted to write, and the directions I thought the Well Known Figure would be well advised to travel in. As it happened, that ghostwriting assignment never happened (or not with me anyway), so I was left with a headful of ideas and no obvious outlet for them.

Though I hadn’t previously been a crime-buff, I couldn’t get these ideas out of my head. After all, the crime tale is just a format around which to tell a story. The genre doesn’t need to be limiting – or at least, no more limiting to the artist than the sonnet-form or the iambic pentameter. And in among the stuff I read, there were some really, really good books. Some of them were inspirational in fact.

The kind of book I realised I wanted to write needed a really strong central character. A character so vibrant, so intense and mysterious, that the books would be as much about her as about the crimes themselves. (Oh, and whyher? Well, I’ll talk about that in a later post, but my detective was a woman from the very first.)

Other questions

Other questions soon answered themselves too:

I wanted to avoid a crude moral approach, where every killer must be a sick bastard and where cops spend their time telling each other ‘Let’s put the sick bastard away.’

I wanted my novels to be dark, but for that darkness to come from mood and tone, not a splatter of gore.

I wanted my books to have a warm human heart: I wanted my central character to have some sustained, close, loving relationships – not merely be the compulsory heavy drinking loner.

Oh, and I also decided that my detective would kick against the stereotypes. Instead of being a middle-aged, male, single, boozer, I’d have her young, female, keen to enter a relationship and a non-smoking teetotaller.

I wanted my book to have a strong sense of place and to say something about the wider society.

I wanted my book to be a proper crime novel: fully inhabiting its genre, unafraid to participate fully in its rules and conventions.

Some of these things reacted against things I came across in my survey of the market – I just got fed up with all those maverick middle-aged cops, the hordes of serial killers with quirkily coded ways of dispatching their victims. Other elements of what I wanted to write picked up on things I found exciting. For example, once I’d encountered the atmospheric writing of Henning Mankell, RJ Ellory and Carl Hiaasen (to name three wildly different writers), I didn’t want my book to be any less placed than theirs.

And I think, in a way, my experience answers that age-old question: do you write for the market or do you write the book you’re passionate about? And the answer is: Both! You have to do both! If you aren’t passionate, you’ll write a rubbish book. If you don’t have a feel for contemporary writers in your area, you’ll be missing the argument. Oh – and now that I’ve started reading crime again, I haven’t stopped. It’s where the juice is!

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Sharing a head with Fiona Griffiths

I’m Harry Bingham. I’m the author of Talking to the Dead, the first of the Fiona Griffiths novels.

I am, technically speaking, sane. I have a job: writing books. I have a wife and dogs. I keep myself clean without much need of external help … but, you know, I’ve got this thing.

A thing where I have to share my head with an interloper. A young, female, Welsh detective with some strange ways and a surprising capacity for violence. Because I happen to make my living from writing, I have a nice neat justification for this particular form of mental illness. But, you know, I really do share my head with a very unusual person. I’ve learned how to see things her way with almost as much ease as I see things my way. She’s become a part of me – and although I love her to bits, she is a very, very strange woman.

I’d love to tell you about what makes her so strange – what forms her strangeness takes – but I’m sorry to say I can’t do that. She’s pretty private about these things and she’s careful about what she says and when she says it. So there won’t be any big revelations in this blog or on this website. You’ll just have to read the book.

But she is one hell of a heroine. Someone asked me whether she was the ass-kicking sort and I had to laugh. Yes, she is, only you don’t want to bet that it’s only your ass she’ll kick. And she’s exceptionally smart, which is helpful in her job. And she’s driven in a way that none of her colleagues are and for reasons that none of them can hope to understand.

You’ll find more about about Fiona here. More about me here. But read the book. It’s the only way you’ll get to find out what it’s like to share your head with Fiona Griffiths. It’s scary, weird, intense & brilliant. Ordinary life seems a bit duller afterwards.

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